Jamie Kastner

Last updated
Jamie Kastner
Nationality Canadian
Occupation(s)film director, screenwriter
Known forThere Are No Fakes, The Secret Disco Revolution, The Skyjacker's Tale

Jamie Kastner is a Canadian writer, director and documentary filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. His company, Cave 7 Productions, produces both theatrical and television productions. [1] Kastner is best known for his feature documentaries, including There Are No Fakes , which premiered at Hot Docs in 2019, [2] The Skyjacker's Tale (2016) [3] and The Secret Disco Revolution , both of which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. [4]

Contents

Career

Jamie Kastner is a member of a family of filmmakers. He is the nephew of actor Peter Kastner and filmmaker John Kastner. [5] Kastner's grandmother, Rose, served as an associate producer on several of John Kastner's films, [6] while his mother, Susan Kastner, was involved in the production of several of Jamie Kastner's films as a researcher. [7] Kastner's wife Laura Baron Kastner is producer and business partner at Cave 7 Productions. [8] Kastner worked as an associate producer and researcher on several of John Kastner's films, including 1997's Hunting Bobby Oatway. [9]

Jamie Kastner's films explore such topics as pop culture, [10] political and social issues, crime and identity. [11] His first documentary was Free Trade Is Killing My Mother (2003), a black comedy about protest. [12] Films such as Djangomania! (2005), [13] Kike Like Me (2007) [14] and Recessionize! For Fun and Profit! (2011). [15] employ both comedy and a first-person, road movie format.Kike Like Me, which follows Kastner as he travels to several countries exploring the notion of modern Jewish identity, premiered at HotDocs in 2007. [16] The film won the Audience Award at Munich Dokfest and was shortlisted for the Grierson Award in 2008. [17]

Kastner has also worked as a producer and writer on several television series, [18] as a newspaper reporter and features writer, [19] [20] playwright, [21] critic and television host. [22]

In 2017, The Harold Greenberg Fund supported the adaptation of The Skyjacker's Tale into a dramatic feature film, titled, The Skyjacker's Son, with Kastner as screenwriter. [23]

Filmography

Awards

AwardDate of CeremonyCategoryResultReference
Canadian Screen Awards May 20, 2021 Direction in a Documentary Program or SeriesNominated [24]
Writing in a Documentary Program or SeriesNominated
Biography or Arts Documentary Program or SeriesNominated

Related Research Articles

Garth Drabinsky is a Canadian film and theatrical producer and entrepreneur. In 2009, he was convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud and forgery. The sentence was reduced from 7 to 5 years in prison, on appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear a subsequent appeal. In April 2023, a judge dismissed Drabinsky’s defamation lawsuit against American Actor’s Equity for placing him on their ‘Do Not Work’ list. Drabinsky has attempted 3 comebacks all resulting in failure and millions of investor dollars being lost.

<i>Winter Kept Us Warm</i> 1965 Canadian film

Winter Kept Us Warm is a Canadian romantic drama film, released in 1965. The title comes from the fifth line of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is the largest documentary festival in North America. The event takes place annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 27th edition of the festival took place online throughout May and June 2020. In addition to the annual festival, Hot Docs owns and operates the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, administers multiple production funds, and runs year-round screening programs including Doc Soup and Hot Docs Showcase.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Kastner</span> Canadian actor (1943-2008)

Peter Kastner was a Canadian-born actor who achieved prominence as a young man in lead roles in the popular 1964 film Nobody Waved Good-bye and in Francis Ford Coppola's 1966 well-received comedy You're a Big Boy Now. He also had a leading role in another film as a young man in 1971 and in a sequel of his debut film in 1984. Additionally, he starred in two short-lived television situation comedy series of 1968 and 1977. Following his promising early success, his career faltered and he became increasingly emotionally troubled in his later years.

Wolf Koenig was a German-born Canadian filmmaker and animator, who pioneered Direct Cinema at the National Film Board of Canada.

Terence Macartney-Filgate was a British-Canadian film director who directed, wrote, produced or shot more than 100 films in a career spanning more than 50 years.

<i>Stories We Tell</i> 2012 film by Sarah Polley

Stories We Tell is a 2012 Canadian documentary film written and directed by Sarah Polley and produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The film explores her family's secrets—including one intimately related to Polley's own identity. Stories We Tell premiered August 29, 2012 at the 69th Venice International Film Festival, then played at the 39th Telluride Film Festival and the 37th Toronto International Film Festival. In 2015, it was added to the Toronto International Film Festival's list of the top 10 Canadian films of all time, at number 10. It was also named the 70th greatest film since 2000 in a 2016 critics' poll by BBC.

NCR: Not Criminally Responsible is a 2013 Canadian documentary film by John Kastner, exploring the effects of the mental disorder defence in Canada, by following the stories of Sean Clifton, who stabbed and badly injured a woman named Julie Bouvier in a shopping mall while he was in a delusional state, and his traumatized victim. It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

John Kastner was a four-time Emmy Award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker whose later work focused on the Canadian criminal justice system. His films included the documentaries Out of Mind, Out of Sight (2014), a film about patients at the Brockville Mental Health Centre, named best Canadian feature documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival; NCR: Not Criminally Responsible (2013), exploring the personal impact of the mental disorder defence in Canada; Life with Murder (2010), The Lifer and the Lady and Parole Dance, and the 1986 made-for-television drama Turning to Stone, set in the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario.

Out of Mind, Out of Sight is a 2014 Canadian documentary film by John Kastner at the Brockville Mental Health Centre. The film concentrates on two floors of the Brockville facility devoted to forensic psychiatry.

<i>Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah</i> 2015 documentary short film by Adam Benzine

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah is a 2015 documentary-short film exploring the life and work of French director Claude Lanzmann. The film was written, directed, and produced by British filmmaker and journalist Adam Benzine.

Justine Pimlott is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Red Queen Productions with Maya Gallus. She began her career apprenticing as a sound recordist with Studio D, the women’s studio at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), in Montreal. As a

Adam Benzine is a British filmmaker and journalist. He received critical appraisal and widespread acclaim for his HBO documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, which examined the life and work of French director Claude Lanzmann. The film earned Benzine an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary category at the 88th Academy Awards, in addition to nominations from the Grierson Awards, the Canadian Screen Awards, the IDA Documentary Awards, the Banff Rockie Awards and the Cinema Eye Honors.

CBC Docs POV is a Canadian television point-of-view documentary series, which airs on CBC Television. The series premiered in fall 2015 under the title Firsthand, replacing Doc Zone, after the CBC discontinued its internal documentary production unit, and was renamed CBC Docs POV in 2017. The series airs one documentary film each week, commissioned from external producers rather than being produced directly by the CBC; some, but not all, films screened as part of the series have also had longer versions separately released as theatrical feature documentaries.

The Skyjacker's Tale is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Jamie Kastner and released in 2016. The film centres on Ishmael Muslim Ali, who was convicted of murder in the Fountain Valley massacre of 1972 and imprisoned before hijacking a plane to Cuba in 1984. It mixes interviews, including the first interview given by Ali himself since the incident, with dramatic reenactments of the hijacking.

<i>There Are No Fakes</i> 2019 Canadian film

There Are No Fakes is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Jamie Kastner and released in 2019. Starting with musician Kevin Hearn's lawsuit against the Maslak McLeod Gallery after being informed that a Norval Morrisseau painting he had purchased appeared to be a forgery, the film expands into an exposé of a significant art fraud ring that has produced many fake Morrisseau paintings through the use of forced child labour in sweatshops, in which some of Morrisseau's own surviving family members are complicit; by some estimates, there may be up to 10 times as much fake Morrisseau art on the market as real work.

<i>The Secret Disco Revolution</i> 2012 Canadian film

The Secret Disco Revolution is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Jamie Kastner and released in 2012. Profiling the disco genre of music and the club culture surrounding it, the film is structured around academic Alice Echols's thesis that the genre played an important role in spurring advances in gender, racial and LGBTQ equality in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The Lindalee Tracey Award is an annual film award, presented in memory of Canadian documentary filmmaker Lindalee Tracey to emerging filmmakers whose works reflect values of social justice and a strong personal point of view. Created by Peter Raymont, Tracey's widower and former filmmaking partner, through his production studio White Pine Pictures, the award is presented annually at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival; however, the award is not limited to documentary films, but may be awarded to films in any genre, and films do not have to have been screened as part of the Hot Docs program to be eligible.

The Last Round: Chuvalo vs. Ali is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Joseph Blasioli and released in 2003. The film centres on the 1966 boxing match at Maple Leaf Gardens between Canadian boxer George Chuvalo and world champion Muhammad Ali.

The Hot Docs Award for Best Canadian Feature Documentary is an annual Canadian film award, presented by the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival to the film selected by jury members as the year's best Canadian feature film in the festival program. The award was presented for the first time in 1998; prior to that year, awards were presented in various genre categories, but no special distinction for Canadian films was presented. The award is sponsored by the Documentary Organization of Canada and Telefilm Canada, and carries a cash prize of $10,000.

References

  1. "Home". cave7productions.com.
  2. Taylor, Kate (23 April 2019). "Hot Docs 2019: Norval Morrisseau, the Barenaked Ladies and the fine art of forgery". The Globe and Mail.
  3. Knelman, Martin (9 September 2016). "Jamie Kastner to use skyjacking doc as springboard to movie drama". The Toronto Star.
  4. "Kastner's "Disco Revolution" heads to America".
  5. "Carrying on the Kastner family business". The Globe and Mail , May 2, 2014.
  6. Benzine, Adam (2 May 2014). "Carrying on the Kastner family business". The Globe and Mail.
  7. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3238484/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 [ user-generated source ]
  8. Knelman, Martin (9 September 2016). "Jamie Kastner to use skyjacking doc as springboard to movie drama". The Toronto Star.
  9. Benzine, Adam (2 May 2014). "Carrying on the Kastner family business". The Globe and Mail.
  10. Benzine, Adam (2 May 2014). "Carrying on the Kastner family business". The Globe and Mail.
  11. Lee, Felicia R. (17 December 2007). "Vexing Questions of Jewish Identity". The New York Times.
  12. Kastner, Jamie (November 2003). "Babe in TV land". The Globe and Mail.
  13. "Django doc hits T.O." [usurped] . Toronto Sun , September 24, 2005.
  14. "Vexing questions of Jewish identity". The New York Times , December 17, 2007.
  15. "Hot Docs grows as filmmakers 'connect the dots'". CTV News, April 28, 2011.
  16. "Kastner doc shortlisted for Grierson award". CBC News . 2008-08-07. Archived from the original on 2022-03-17.
  17. "Kastner doc shortlisted for Grierson award". CBC News . 2008-08-07. Archived from the original on 2022-03-17.
  18. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-kastner-b8254616/ [ self-published source ]
  19. "Jamie Kastner". 30 July 2013.
  20. "Just the two of us: Holidays for single parents". TheGuardian.com . 19 February 2011.
  21. "Jamie Kastner". 30 July 2013.
  22. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-kastner-b8254616/details/experience/ [ self-published source ]
  23. "Bell Media's Harold Greenberg Fund Announces Script Development Support for 33 Canadian Film Projects".
  24. Furdyk, Brent (2021-03-30). "Television Nominees Announced For 2021 Canadian Screen Awards, 'Schitt's Creek' Leads The Pack With 21 Nominations". ET Canada. Archived from the original on March 30, 2021. Retrieved 2021-07-06.